Audiences Prep

Let me define the terms of our audience.

You may be in another country and it may be that everybody understands English but it’s the second or third language or it may be that you have an audience that doesn’t understand a word of English.

By the way I only speak English so I’m talking to you about English because that’s what I understand.

You may be speaking to an audience they don’t understand English but they do have an interpreter who is either speaking to them and I have an earpiece in or the interpreter is saying it out loud every 30 seconds or so.

Or it may be an audience combined with all that so I’m going to give you some tips that try to cover all these different scenarios.

For starters the preparation for a presentation to foreign audiences can be a little bit different.

Now I’m not normally a fan of writing speeches out word for word but if ever you do write your speech out for now is the time to do it because if you’re working with an interpreter It’s great to give that to the person in advance and now you can say hey I’m going to be using my own terms.

I may be ad libbing.

This isn’t a verbatim script but a lot of it is going to come from this.

If you give that to the translator in advance it will help the translator immensely.

You know who else you can give this to the audience.

If you’re speaking to a conference of 300 colleagues and they’re in your field and you’re speaking about something that you know they’re going to be interested in.

Try to email the entire document to them and it’s going to be pretty easy for them to get it translated but these days you just put things in Google Docs translation and it does a pretty good job not 100 percent or you may actually want to hire someone to translate the text to give it to people in advance.

These are things that are nice to do.

Now let’s say you’re at the venue and you see there is in fact a translator.

I always recommend you go up you shake hands you’re polite you try to establish some commonality if you have a book or anything like that give it to them as far in advance as possible but certainly if you are speaking half an hour from now you can’t expect them to read your whole book.

The sooner you get to meet the translator the better they more they know about you the more they know about the content what you’re trying to do the easier it’s going to be for them to translate for you Also simply talking to you is going to make it easier for them to do their job.

So if you’re speaking after lunch and you’re at a conference and you get there that morning I’d go so far as to recommend having lunch with a translator if that person is available and they can start to get comfortable with your speech pattern.

So these are all things you can do before your speech even starts to increase the odds that you will be understood and remembered by the audience.